Money Schemes - Learn How To Make Money Online

Every now and then I get an idea, more of a brain fart than anything, about a new website that I’d like to do. Unfortunately for me I’ve got 3 websites that I need to finish, including one custom CMS and a commercial software project that MUST get done. Rather than keeping these things to myself for some point in the future and then do nothing with them I thought it might be interesting to throw it out there and see if anybody else wants it. Just so everybody doesn’t think that I’m just chucking out any old rubbish it’s worth mentioning that of the 20+ websites I’ve done to date not one hasn’t made a 3 figure profit at worst (Even the one about Spanish Diet Habits!).

Sea Kayaking
So here we go with Sea Kayaking, like all my ideas it was just down to me thinking something will become popular. There has been a lot of interest in this where I live and I’ve seen an increasing trend in Sea Kayaking for fishing in several countries. If anybody wants to do anything with this then here’s a little background info.

Search Phrases, Daily Searches, Competition, KEI

1 sea kayaking 2,642 2120000 3.293
2 sea kayaking essex 2,593 152000 44.235
3 sea kayak 2,447 2460000 2.434
4 nomad sea kayak 2,411 77800 74.716
5 sea kayak braintree 1,811 15900 206.272
6 sea kayak belize 400 369000 0.434
7 kayak sea 97 1600000 0.006
The Competition – Google

Sea Kayaking – 91,000 pages with the keyword in the title, no1 ranking has PR 4 with 38 inbound link. No2 ranking has PR4 with 31 inbound links.

Sea Kayak – 70,400 pages with the keyword in the title, no1 ranking has PR 4 with 38 inbound link. No2 ranking has PR4 with 21 inbound links.

Nomad Sea Kayak – 0 pages with the keyword in the title, no1 ranking has PR 2 with 2 inbound link. No2 ranking has PR0 with 7 inbound links.

How To Make Money

It’s an expensive hobby, the Kayak and safety equipment all cost real money. There are also large areas to write about so content should not be a problem. Not only would Adsense ads be productive but a high ranking would also bring about direct to advertiser opportunities for the many online outdoor adventure stores that exist. It is also a good community sport so a forum could be a possibility.

As a niche I’d give it an overall potential score of 7-10, my only worry being the number of people interesting in this type of hobby that would also use the internet but the search figures seem to indicate that this not be a problem.

I hate it when my daughter spends hours in front of the television, glued to the same old endless repeats on the Disney channel. Doesn’t matter if it’s Hannah Montana, That’s So Raven, Cory In the House, Zoey 101 or High School Musical it just annoys me that’s she’s wasting her time watching the same old repeated rubbish. Even if she was only watching 1 hour a day of Disney it would work out at a waste of 243 days of her life by the time she was sixteen!

This got me thinking about my own time and how I waste it. I’ve managed to get rid of my habit of checking earnings but I still waste far too much time checking Google Analytics instead of being productive. Over the last 4 years I’ve wasted 2 whole months of my time doing nothing but refreshing analytics pages.

That’s enough work for one day, I guess it’s time to get us both out of the house, get a little air and do a little exercise.

SEO, to some a science to others a load of rubbish. Either way there are a few things that will definitely get you punished in the natural search results, no if’s or but’s about it. Bad redirects, a non spider friendly layout and duplicate content are some of the main ways of ensuring you under achieve. Luckily there are plenty of free tools out there to help, these are some of the checks I run on each page I create:-

Bad Redirects
In my mind anything other than a 301 permanent redirect is bad, if you’re looking for a quick way of being shunned in the search engines then I doubt there’s any quicker way then using a 302 redirect. It’s surprising how often this turns up and how often it catches out SEO professionals. For example if you’re using domain forwarding with the Plesk control panel you’re doing a 302 redirect and punishing your target domain.

Being Spider Friendly
Spiders are the bitches of the search engines, they’re out there doing all the work and reporting back what they find but get none of the credit. If you want to get on with a search engine, get on with the wife. If your content isn’t spider friendly then there’s a good chance that it’s not all going to be found and so not appear in the index and search results.

Avoiding Duplicate Content
You’ve spent ages writing content for your website, the last thing you want is for somebody to steal it. What’s even worse is for a bad site structure to result in you getting a duplicate content penalty for your own content. It’s best to run this tool once your content has been live for a month or so. If somebody else has copied you then lay the smack down on them, if it’s one of your own sites then use your robots.txt, nofollow or some other method to block one copy of the content from being indexed.

A lot of the talk around the blogging world of making money is about WordPress templates today. One of the better known bloggers out there has decided to go the whole hog and got himself a brand spanky new custom template. For the purists who like clean web design that emphasises the content it’s not been so popular, for those who are more concerned with making money it’s been a big hit.

It does beg the question though, is there a limit to the amount of money your blog template can make you? John Chow obviously thinks so and so do a lot of his readers who expect him to top the $20,000 a month mark this month due to the extra adverts he’s crammed in. When all your ad spots are full does it make sense to get a new template with more spots, I think so, what about you?

John Chow’s New Template

John Chow’s Old Template

So after 3 months of using the Agloco toolbar I’ve finally called time on it. It’s either not adding my hours correctly, not showing any adverts, not letting me login or on occasion all three!

What Is Agloco?
Agloco stands for A Global Community and was supposed to be a way of rewarding people for surfing the internet. A Global Community, sounds like a load of hippy crap right? The way it actually was supposed to work was that you earn “shares” in the company by using their toolbar and then any profit the company makes is split amongst the shareholders. Whilst the ins and outs were always a little fuzzy (at best) it was free so you had nothing to lose.

Bye Bye Agloco
Although I haven’t lost anything over the last 3 months, apart from maybe a small portion of the bottom of my desktop (on the rare occasions the toolbar has worked) I have finally lost my patience. How can the toolbar be generating revenue if it’s not working, not serving ads or not letting people sign in? If it’s not earning money then this company should be due to turn a profit some time around the year………never. Even when it has worked my credited hours are all over the place. Maybe it’s just me and my dodgy PC(s)? Maybe not, 95% of my referrals don’t use the toolbar each month, those who I speak to have uninstalled it for exactly the same reasons I have i.e. it doesn’t work.

Personally I would have thought that having a nailed down toolbar generating revenue would have been the key to this business idea. My own opinion as well is that it wouldn’t be that hard to achieve, not that I know much about integrating desktop and web based technologies. If it were me I’d probably just embed a simple browser component inside a form and then rely on some sort of 3rd party ad serving technology to display text ads inside that window. There is nothing to opening the ad destination URI in the default browser. Either that or a nice xml web service to serve the ads if the ad partner can facilitate it. For the hours a quick look at the process list will reveal if a browser is currently running and you can look at its window handle to see if it’s visible, get the browser URI, retrieve and strip text and you can see the interests of the viewer. It’s then just a case of reporting via a very simple xml web service. You’ll need some load balancing at the server end but no biggy. That’s just me, there’s no way a business would base everything on something as simple as that. Whatever they have done though appears to be very much hit and miss. I’d suggest if your business has one way of making money then you make sure that one way works!

To show how bad it’s got I’m not even including an Agloco referral link in this post, now that’s a serious state of affairs.

When it comes to making money from your website you need fresh traffic. By fresh I mean visitors that have not seen the adverts and products you are pushing 10 times before reaching you. If this blog has taught me one thing already it’s that referral traffic from websites in your own area is rubbish in terms of conversions when compared to the fresh visitors referred by the search engines. I want to be the first website a visitor sees an offer or advert on.

Free Keyword Research Tools

In order to do that you’re going to need to attract search engine traffic and one of the key elements in that is ranking well for phrases that people search for. But how do you know what people are searching for? This is where keyword research tools come in. The following list is the free tools I use each and every time I setup a new website and even every page on my static websites. For a blog I don’t bother so much but it can still be handy when deciding on that blog post title! I just tend to look for words that get searched for a lot and ignore the competition, I’ll go into KEI and other nonsense later on.

• Keyword Discovery – This free tool from keyword discovery will show you the top 100 related results in order of search popularity for whatever start phrase you use.
• Wordtracker – I think this is one of the originals and probably still one of the best. Wordtracker have a huge reputation in keyword research.
• Google Adwords – An essential part of my Adwords campaigns is starting with this tool. Want to know how competitive and how many times a search phrase is looked for then this will tell you. One of the very few ways of getting an insight into Google’s own search popularity data.
• Google Labs, Suggestion Tool – A bit different from the others in that it will bring up popular searches as you begin to type a phrase, a very quick way of drilling down into some long tail keywords.
• Overture – Another one of the originals but still a goody. Information is sourced from the Overture ad network.
• SEOBook – A bit of a mish mash of the others really combining, Google and Overture data. It works well though.
• WebCEO – One of the elements of this SEO suite is a great free keyword research tool. The paid version provides even more results as well as letting you know all about your direct competition (Page Rank, Links) for any phrases in each of the search engines.

As part of the ongoing process I do with every new website I create I’ve been checking my statistics using Google Analytics since day one of this blog. One thing has stood out in that time more than anything else, that’s the number of people using Google’s site operator against www.themakemoneyonline.net

What sort of a visitor does this?
I’ve got no idea but people are doing that search sometimes 5 times a day! The site operator is used to see what pages Google and Yahoo (Microsoft did support it but now appear to have dropped it) have indexed for a particular website. Typing “site:www.themakemoneyonilne.net” into the Google search box will return all the pages currently included in Google’s index. It’s really a webmaster tool, I don’t tend to bother with it much these days as it’s so easy to get indexed by Google it’s not worth checking. If you know any reason why somebody would be interested in running this against somebody else’s website then I’d love to know?

In other news the blog has had it’s first bit of SEO success, up to now it’s been visited almost entirely by referrals but its just had it’s first hit for “blogging and money making“. Considering I’m ignoring my own SEO rules to make it a much easier read I’m more than happy with the results.

What domain name should you use? Well there are 2 schools of thought about this.

1. Use your business name
2. Use a product/service related name

The first of these is obvious, if you company is called John’s Cars then look for johnscars.com, johns-cars.com etc etc Are you a well known brand? If not then this could be a very bad idea. I’ve seen plenty of local companies go down this route, of course the only way anybody ever finds their website is if it’s told to them via some other means e.g. in person, via the radio, newspaper ads. Sort of defeats the point of paying for a website doesn’t it if you then have to pay to get people to even find the thing?

The second approach is to use product or service related keywords. John’s Cars is an Isle of Man based second hand car dealership. Something like iomcarsales.co.uk or carsforsale.com are going to give him a huge boost (depending on search engine) in terms of search ranking. His website can then work to attract new customers instead of just being somewhere for all his other paid adverts to point to.

As you might guess I prefer the second option, however the next question is “But doesn’t that domain look dodgy, what about my business cards etc?” The beauty of this approach is that there is no reason not to use both. Domain names are cheap, if your business can’t afford another $7.95 a year for a domain name then your website should be the least of your troubles. I’d advise that you go for the second approach for your physically hosted website, and then use the first to host your e-mail. That way you can be contacted by e-mailing johnscars.com, can have johnscars.com on your business cards as your web address but you get the search benefits of being called iomcarsales.co.uk The only thing needed to make this happen is a simple 301 permanent redirection from the johnscars.com domain to iomcarsales.co.uk

But how important is the domain name?
Without mentioning any names, I know of 2 companies that operate in the same area, trying to attract the same clients. One went company name, the other went service related. With equal amounts of SEO in place, 1 had filled their books within 2 months, the other was struggling to get one enquiry a month. Obviously one had better search rankings, not only that but a major part of what Google shows you in the search results is the domain name. A lot of people clicked through the one which had the serice they were looking for in the domain name.